Steps in the Past
by Tess Phoenix
Summary: Ion used to be a core, but switched to a humanoid body in an Aperture secret experiment. She was forced to watch the other cores get wheeled away to an incinerator. She won't let any more cores die when she finds one that falls from space. Slight OC/Wheatley, but not much.
1. Chapter 1 - Memories

**Hey guys, Tess Phoenix here. Just before we get started here, I just want to tell those who have been reading my other fanfictions that I'll be taking a break from both The Tesseract and Twisted Hope. I know they're not even close to done, but I was really itching to get a Portal story in. So, enjoy this and please review! :)**

* * *

She stared at the ground defiantly with the same look she'd kept for a long time. It was the last look she'd made before she'd been shut off, her eyes open but darkness filling her vision. She felt nothing, heard nothing, saw nothing.

Until now.

The small switch on her back was flicked up and her power came on, electricity running through her. She took in a deep breath like a real person; that was how she'd been built to react. Like a real person. She looked around, the walls and floor old and worn down. Wherever she was, it hadn't been used in a long time. The bird that had flicked her switch squawked in surprise and flew up into the air.

"Thank you," she mouthed to it and struggled to stand. Her legs were weak and she was out of practice walking. Nonetheless, she used the wall to support herself and she walked down the rundown hallway, wondering still where she was.

Memories that should have been there flickered on and off in her mind, coming in only small bursts of information. She remembered people carrying her, not the humanoid her, but a smaller version of her. She remembered the small spherical robots looking at her with what would've been worry if they'd been human. She remembered the strange feeling that was a mix of pain and shock as she switched bodies. Those spherical robots were tossed into some kind of incinerator and they screamed out with electronic voices. There was only one other thing she remembered: Aperture Laboratories. The logo was bright and clear in her memory and it was the only thing she was slightly happy to remember. Her home.

Her walking got better as she roamed through rooms and halls. Soon she was walking without help from rails or walls. Broken glass crunched beneath her feet and she brushed past vines and large leaves that clung to practically everything it could grasp. Everything was a mess and it all seemed uninhabited. That was, until she heard the voice.

"You." She froze. She knew that voice, all cores knew that voice. They knew it all too well.

"GLaDOS," she said. "Nice to hear from you again. I imagine you're doing well?"

"Ion. I thought you'd been incinerated."

"The others were, but I pulled through. I shouldn't have, but I did."

"Well, you will make a good test sub-"

"No," Ion interrupted, "No testing. I'm not a test subject and I never was. I wasn't built for your enjoyment." GLaDOS's electronic voice growled in anger. She didn't have to put up with this human wannabe and wasn't going to.

"Fine. Too bad there's no place to bury you. Oh, wait, you're not human. It looks like you'll just rust like everything else here when I'm done with you." Ion gritted her teeth and pressed forward. Hopefully she wasn't getting any closer to GLaDOS's lair than she wanted to. She just wanted to go home. Surely this place wasn't home, home didn't look like this.

Despite the threats from GLaDOS, nothing dangerous came up. No turrets, no spiky plates, no neurotoxins. Just debris filled hallways and rooms filled with things of no use. But something odd did come up. Ion hadn't thought this trashed-up place had been home, but as she continued walking everything kept getting more familiar and more familiar. She passed through a door and a burst of realization came at her like a bullet. The Operation Room, the very place she'd switched bodies and saw her fellow cores being wheeled out of the room to be incinerated. She looked around, placing a hand on the large white operating table in the center of the room. A pang of sadness hit her even though she was supposed to be a very positive core. Her best friend had called out to her here while she'd been on that table. It was hard to believe cores could be friends, but she and the Prank Core had gotten along the best any core could have. In the short period of time he'd been alive they'd become close friends. Now, he was gone.

Something caught Ion's eye as she walked around the room. It sat in the corner of the room on the floor, covered in shattered glass and vines that had somehow been able to reach through the window and down onto the floor. She knelt down and brushed away the glass and vines. If robots could cry, she would have. There the Prank Core's would-be self sat, a humanoid robot with reddish-brown hair and a pair of glasses on the bridge of his nose that made him look more intelligent. Ion had wanted that added. The robot body wore a white suit, stained with rust and dirt that had the Aperture Science logo under the breast pocket. Ion brushed the hair out of its eyes and caressed its cheek sadly. The Prank Core's desperate human like cry echoed in her mind.

"I wanted to see how this would turn out," GLaDOS said with false sympathy. Ion glared at the security camera on the wall angrily.

"Stop it! For two seconds would you just shut up!" She put as much emphasis on the last two words as she could. It was quiet again and Ion cleaned off as much dirt and grime as she could off the body and dragged a chair over. She set the body in it and positioned it so that it looked like it was just sleeping sitting up. She almost expected the Prank Core to come to life inside the body and scare her playfully. It didn't happen, but she wished it would.

"He's not coming back," GLaDOS taunted.

"I know," Ion replied, "and I can't do anything about it. So it's no good for me to stay here." She walked out of the room and to one of the elevators.

"Where do you think you're going?"

"Out and I'm never coming back."


	2. Chapter 2 - Return

Ion stood in the dark, looking at the stars. It'd been so long since she'd seen them and so she had done what she did best: she imagined them. She was called the Imagination Core for a reason.

She took a deep breath and sat on the edge of the concrete slab. There was no use going anywhere since she couldn't really see anything. Trekking into the field would mean nothing without daylight.

She lay on her back and reached up, tracing constellations with her finger. After all this time, the stars had never changed. Then, her finger stopped. Just above Orion's Belt was an oddly bright star. She didn't remember that one ever being there. It got brighter and brighter until she finally realized it wasn't a star. It was something else entirely! It fell from the sky, landing in the field, the sound of it touching ground echoing through the empty space. Quickly, Ion rushed towards it, imagining what it could be.

A flickering light beckoned her as she got closer. She raced through the tall grass, running for the first time since she'd awakened. Finally, she reached the crash site only to be shocked with what she saw. A core had fallen from space and its eye flickered with blue light. A quiet electronic moan escaped it and Ion knelt in the dirt beside it. Speechless she looked down at it with curiosity. Its eye moved so it looked into hers.

"Help," it groaned quietly, its eye getting dimmer. Ion rushed through her options until she came to one she didn't believe she was going to go through with. She picked up the core gently and rushed back to the small metal building that was the exit to the laboratories. She pounded on the door and it opened to her surprise. Did GLaDOS know it was her? Wait, that didn't matter. She got in the elevator and the door close, descending into the floors below. Ion hugged the core carefully, watching in worry as its light got even dimmer. Finally, they reached the floor Ion had last left from only half and hour ago.

"You're back early for 'never coming back'," GLaDOS remarked. Ion ignored her and burst through the door to the Operating Room. The humanoid robot body still waited in the chair she'd put it in. She set the core on the operating table and turned the chair around so the robot's back was facing the table. Hurriedly, she dug through numerous drawers until she found a long black chord. Plugging on end into the core and the other into the body, she manned the remote in the center of the chord.

"This is going to feel funny," she told the core, her voice shaky. "But if it works, it'll save your life." The loading bar on the screen of the remote began to fill and the core's light stopped flickering.

"What are you doing?" the feminine voice asked in shock.

"Saving this core's life. It may be the only friend I'll ever have again."

"That's the moron, you lunatic!" GLaDOS cried.

"I don't care!" Ion shot back not really understanding what she was getting at. The loading bar reached halfway. It was going well so far which was a good sign, but anything could go wrong along the way. Ion just imagined what would happen when it finished loading and hoped for the best.

The room was quiet the whole time the process was reaching completion. GLaDOS watched in disgust as the humanoid corrupted core stared at the remote on the chord. She wasn't sure why the scientists had decided to keep her even though she had pulled through their experiment. She'd been the prototype; worthless. Her annoying friend, the Prank Core, had been incinerated because he'd failed to pass through into his humanoid body. GLaDOS was glad he was gone, he'd annoyed her to the point she wanted to shut down permanently. But though he was annoying, Ion was persistent and was always able to imagine a happy future because that's what she was built to do.

A loud beep came from the remote and Ion's eyes widened hopefully. She pulled the chord out of the blue-eyed core and out of the humanoid body. Flicking a small switch on the back of the neck of the body, she stood in front of it, hands on her knees with anxiousness and worry on her face. Soft whirrs from inside the robotic body came to life and its eyes flickered. It looked at her, lifting its head slightly.

"Ch-Chell?" it asked softly with a distinct English accented male voice.

"Chell?" Ion repeated confused.

"I'm sorry…" His voice trailed off and he slumped back, fading out of consciousness. Though confused with what he'd said, Ion sighed with relief. It had worked miraculously even though so many other cores had failed to pull through.

"Congratulations," GLaDOS remarked dryly. "You managed to save the moron. Now what do you plan to do?"

"Wait until he wakes up. Then we'll go from there." GLaDOS made a sound that Ion took as a doubting 'hmph'. She wanted to know who this core was and she wasn't going to rely on GLaDOS to tell her.

* * *

Ion had fallen asleep that night in the corner of the operating room, using her arm as a pillow. Her eyes fluttered open as she awoke from her sleep. The other humanoid core was still slumped and unconscious. She sat up and stretched, brushing the dust off the sleeves of her jumpsuit. The lights were still out in the room from when she'd turned them off that night. She hit the switch and the bright white lights filled the room once again.

"What to do," she mumbled to herself leaning in the doorway of the room. She wanted to wait until he woke up, but who knew how long that'd be?

"Good morning sunshine," GLaDOS greeted sarcastically.

"Shut it GLaDOS," Ion snapped, "I just woke up. You're going to give me a headache."

"That will be justice for bringing him back. You should have let him die." She shook her head in annoyance.

"Two hours, that's all I ask. Two hours without you speaking, okay? Please?" GLaDOS was silent for a moment, but agreed deciding to watch how it'd play out. Maybe she'd throw in a turret or two- if she could find one that hadn't been crushed, burnt, or shot. Neurotoxins wouldn't work on them and it was gone, so there wasn't much fun in searching desperately for something that wasn't there. Two hours was all she had to find a way to stop the 'moron' from getting any further than the doorway of that room. He had to pay for what he'd done even if it meant putting him out permanently. She didn't care how he died, as long as he did die was all that mattered. She'd take care of the 'Imagination Core' later. There might be some fun in playing with her instead of other robots that were easy to bring back if they made a mistake and died.

Ion relished the silence as she relaxed in the doorway. But it was cut short by a familiar whirring noise and a slight groan from inside the room. The core in his new body was waking up. He opened his eyes, his vision quite blurry from lack of use. He lifted his head and looked around a bit through the blurriness. He couldn't really see anything; that was, unless he moved his eyes down a bit. He could see clearer through the glass thing that rested on the bridge of his nose. He pushed it up and noticed his finger for the first time. Further examination of himself showed that he wasn't a relatively small, spherical robot that needed rails along the ceiling to move around on his own. He was human! Well, sort of anyway. The noises and tiny lights barely visible inside of his eyelids didn't exactly tell him he was completely 100% human.

"Hey," a feminine voice behind him said. "Good to see you're awake." He looked down at his middle, figuring out how to turn, and looked to see where the voice had come from. A girl with bright, almost glowing orange-yellow eyes and black hair pulled back into a ponytail smiled at him pleasantly.

"I remember you," he said, recalling a vague memory of her. There wasn't much to remember other than that she kind of looked like Chell.

"You were awake before for a minute. Feeling okay now?" He nodded oddly, trying out his new neck. Man this body was bloody hard to move. "It's hard to move around for a little while, but you get used to it quick."

"W-who are you?" he asked, stumbling over his words a bit.

"My name's Ion. You are…?"

"Wheatley."

"Wheatley…" Ion repeated to herself, getting the odd feeling she'd heard that name somewhere before. She glanced back at his original, beat up core body. Nothing had sparked in her mind when she'd first picked him up, but in that condition no one would recognize him. But his name kept nagging at her and she tried to dig deep into her memories, but all she got was a sharp pain through her head. Something wasn't letting her remember whatever it was about him she knew once. She shook her head and the pain gradually faded.

"What, uh, happened… to me?" Wheatley asked awkwardly as he strained to get a good look at his old self lying on the table.

"You fell. From the sky. I don't really know where you came from, but you hit the ground pretty hard." He remembered being in space and floating around aimlessly with that annoying voice echoing around him. What came after that was a blur.

"Nothing else? Fell, I mean?" he asked. Ion shook her head.

"No, just you. Why, was someone else with you out there?"

"No, I mean yes! But, I don't know where he is." Ion crossed her arms and stared into space in thought. Suddenly, there was a loud noise and the room went dark.


End file.
